Nunc enim sermo de toto est

May 10, 2010

The Soul Is a Trapped Gas

In Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 Mason &
Dixon, Charles Mason Sr., the father of one of the two great
American
explorers, claims to believe

that bread is alive,—that the
yeast Animalcula may unite into a single purposeful individual,—that
each Loaf is so organized, with the crust, for example, serving as skin
or Carapace,—the small cavities within exhibiting a strange complexity,
their pale Walls, to appearance smooth, proving, upon magnification,
to be made up of even smaller bubbles, and, one may presume, so forth,
down to the Limits of the Invisible. The Loaf, the indispensible point
of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern
Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness.

Is bread in fact like the soul? It is
well known that our own word for the biotic condition does not descend
from the same distinguished Indo-European lineage as bios,
vita, vie, and so on. Instead life, along with the
related Germanic cognates such as Leben
and leven, took the place of bios
and its variations thanks to the intervention of the humble loaf,
which originally had none of the connotation of the verb “to loaf,”
but had instead only to do with bread. Indeed, loaf is a cognate
of the Russian word for bread, khleb, and also of the Gothic
hlaif. At some point, then, and I really do not know when, the
ancient
Germanic tribes started using the word for bread to denote life itself,
since, obviously, bread sustains life, is a condition of life, and thus,
in some primitive way of thinking into which it is not all that hard
to work one’s way back, is life.

It is quite likely that Mason Sr. is
being made by Pynchon to paraphrase a commonplace of what was often
called “chemical philosophy” or “chymistry,” but since the eighteenth
century has been marginalized as mere alchemy: the primitive, irrational
ancestor of chemistry. Chymistry, or alchemy, or whatever you wish to
call it, had as one of its central goals the isolation of the “essences”
or “spirits” of things through laboratory means such as distillation.
In Johann Agricola’s Chymische Medicin
of 1638, for example, we are given practical advice for the distillation
of spirit out of flesh, blood, sugar, and, of all things, bread. The
spiritus panis, which Agricola describes as a vapor that remains
in the glass bubble of the alembic after the alchemist has performed
his operations, is a sort of “pure bread,” or bread reduced down
to its very essence. It is to bread what my immortal soul is to me.